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Alrighty, back with another one of those block rockin’ beats to quote those Englishmen, the Chemical Brothers.

Last time we looked at offset tracking in Shake, a relatively straightforward and easy affair . . . not so in After Effects as it turns out. Hopefully this will help you out. Thanks to my co-worker Dan Bryant for showing me this method which I then finally found somewhere else on the net with Carl Larsen’s video over at Creative Cow. If you are an After Effects user and aren’t checking Creative cow, then shame on you!

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Offset tracking?  What about tracking in general, Matt?  Hold your horses and steady on!  I freely admit that this is an old tutorial I did for the University course I taught, so apologies to my previous students . . . please don’t let this make you feel any less special.  You are all unique snowflakes!

Actually the real reason is that upon reflection my original tracking video might raise the ire of Teh Appel Corporation as I used the standard footage provided in the shake tutorial book . . . soooooo, rather than risk a multi-billionaire dollar lawsuit and put Steve Jobs already strained health under more stress, I will look at doing a re-edit with some techniques I learned on ‘Australia’.  

Now, these concepts can be applied to pretty much any compositing software.  As far as I know they all have the ability to offset or append a search region.  Why do we do this?  The main reason is because your main tracking points become obscured or head offscreen.  The thing is, as an aspiring compositor or 3D person, you might not know that this is possible, so you will be fighting your footage trying to get “the perfect track” on a point when it either just can’t be done or you can get a better track quicker and with less time wastage by choosing better tracking data at some point in your clip.

So, without further delay, check it, like, totally out.  As always, comments, questions and additions are welcome.  Only unnecessarily over the top profanity is frowned upon.

Offset tracking. Sexxy, no? No.

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Life is funny.  Things are going one way and then ZING!  Off you go in another direction.  That onomatopoeia was meant to represent me changing direction slightly.  

On Sunday my car had major problems leading me to crash at my sisters house for a few days (hence the lack of an update) and it looked bad . . . very bad.  As soon as you have engine problems on a car with 235,000 km’s you start to think in mid 4 figure amounts.  I had had an interview the previous Friday and I was stressing a little about a possible move with a massive car expense and not much sleep was coming my way.

I iz a happy cat!

As it turns out, it was a relatively minor problem with the car (considering what I thought could go wrong), I was offered the job at a decent wage doing cool stuff in a great new city and I will be teaming up with one of my very good friends from Animalia again!

Soooo to cut a medium length story slightly longer: I will be starting with compositing and VFX on children’s animated television show with Ettamogah Entertainment down in Melbourne in mid-June.  I am really looking forward to it as I will get a chance to get my hands on some new-ish (for me) software for some production experience.  While I have used Maya and After Effects for personal projects, I am chuffed to get down and dirty with them with the possibility of some suh-weet houdini action as well.  All this is good for you, dear readers, as there will be a broader range of tips coming your way!

And, in a great twist, I will be working with my good mate Rodrigo Guimaraes again!  Rodrigo and I started on the same day together back on Animalia and we (and the other compers) had a blast hanging out together on the project, so it is with a glad heart that I will see my Brazilian mate again.

Throw into the mix a move to Melbourne, a very funky city and things are looking very exciting indeed.

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I finally got my desktop fired up and grabbed this video I made last year for class.  I have a 50meg version of this I will try and get up soon if 80meg is too big.  I have used Simon Reeves’ excellent breakdown on his website www.bankaffairs.com.  Check it out for some very clear examples of using RBG passes for compositing in CSI Please note that all images are copyright Simon Reeves and are to be used for education purposes only.  Check out Simon’s main site at www.simonreeves.com.

Note: for clarity (and my own workflow), I have reordered the channels of the RBG passes before feeding them into nodes.  You don’t have to do this in Shake.  In the node being masked you can choose which channel you want to use as the mask.

Images (c) Simon Reeves

This topic came up recently on CGTalk and I also covered it in the compositing course I taught at the Queensland College of Art.  I do have a video screencast as well that I did that I will try and dig up as I think it is on my main PC which is in pieces at the moment.

Inspiring, no?

The question was: “How do I use ID passes (or RGB mattes) in my compositing?”

I guess the first place to start is to remember that compositing is all about colour channels.  Pretty much the first thing you do when you get your plates is check the colour channels (red, green and blue) to see what kind of information is there.  When you are working with straight CG images, it is a bit different.  You will often have various black and white mattes rendered out for you to isolate various objects in a scene.

As we (hopefully) know by now, mattes are essentially greyscale (grayscale for you North American types) images that affect an area of your based on the intensity of the pixel colour value, usually with pure white affecting the change the most and black affecting the least.  These can be things like images, patterns, keys or rotoshapes.

The good thing about CG is you can output just about anything relating to your render.  Diffuse, specular, shadow, reflection, refraction, velocity, ID’s . . . the list is long.  The most basic pass you will get will be something like a foreground character that has it’s alpha channel already pre-multiplied (RGBA).  That is, you could stick it straight over a background as it already has an alpha channel.

Often, however, you will be given a pass that has an object, or several objects, shaded pure red, pure green and pure blue.  Why?  Well, we know that we can use this colour information to mask our objects.  By using or reordering/shuffling our channels, we can isolate a particular object using our RGB.  

Let’s look at an example scene.  Behold the power of Autodesk Maya.  I fully realise that this scene is beyond average and should not be used as an example of my actual 3D skills.  I am trying to make this as simple as possible.  No, really!

Basic colour pass

Now, our very nice lighting and rendering department has given us not one, but two extra passes to help finesse our scene.  The first is a straight RGB matte pass:

RGB matte pass

The second pass is an RGB lighting pass.  This is essentially our scene with 2 or 3 lights (key, fill and rim) and a basic shader.  Again, the lights are pure colours:

RGB lighting pass. Only red and green in this example.

So how do we use these passes?  I am going to use Shake and the reorder node for clarity here.  In Shake, and other compositing apps, you can often just choose in the node or effect which channel you want to use to affect that node or effect.  I am a big fan of clarity though, and as such, I prefer to use the Reorder node so I can instantly see which channel I am using:

Shake script overview

So, as you can see, I have split off three Reorder nodes from the tips_RGB_matte image:

RED

tips_RGB_matte RED channel

GREEN

tips_RGB_matte GREEN channel

BLUE

tips_RGB_matte BLUE channel

And here are the reordered red and green channels of our tips_RGB_lights pass:

RED

tips_RGB_lights RED channel

GREEN

tips_RGB_lights

ALRIGHTY!!!!!  We are pretty much ready now.  As we can see, now we have a bunch of nice clean mattes which we can use to modify not only the objects in the scene, but possibly use to relight the scene entirely.

Soooooo, going down my super mega awesome compu-tron 2000 script, we can see that I have brightened the cube, multiplied the sphere by a strong green and added a slightly horrific shade of orange to the cone.  Not brilliant but you get the idea.

Brightening the cube

Greening the sphere

Orange cones are good cones

On to the basic relighting, we can use the two lighting channels to change the colour and intensity of our key and fill lights.  To change the intensity I expanded the alpha after the reorders (essentially a levels call):

Relighting using the key light (red tinge)

Relighting using fill light (green tinge)

It’s possibly not as clear as day and night in the above shots, but as you can see, with just two extra passes from your 3D application, you suddenly have a lot more options for adjusting the looking of your comp without fussing about.

As always, if you have question, comments or suggestions, let me know below.

I will start by saying that I will avoid the whole Mac vs PC debacle.  Suffice to say that with Shake being dead, the case for owning a Mac purely for compositing has been dealt a blow.  Of course Nuke runs on Mac (quite nicely apparently) as does 3D software such as Autodesk Maya (sub-par compared to PC and *nix) and Houdini (stable, from all reports).

Here’s what I consider the minimum gear to work quickly in CG:

Two Monitors

The monitor of choice

This should be a no-brainer, but if you haven’t experienced the joys of a dual monitor setup, you are really missing out.  Thankfully these days even lowly video cards have dual DVI-outs, so it is as simple as inserting the card and connecting up your monitors.  Some software makes good use of the dual monitors with the second being used as a reference monitor, such as The Foundry’s Nuke, while others pretty much just use the second monitor as a storage space for all your floating palettes (Adobe Photoshop).

Other than that, dual setups are perfect for training as you can have the video open on one monitor while following along on the other.  Watching video training on a single monitor is about as fun as having starving penguins kick you to death and then eat you.

What monitor?  Frankly, for the price you can’t go past the Dell 24″ 2408WFP.  Sure it might be a little more expensive than others, but it has excellent colour reproduction thanks to it’s 8 bit panel.  Most of the cheaper monitors use the cheaper 6bit panels as far as I know.  Keep an eye out for weekly sales and scour the internet for extra 20% off codes that are sometimes emailed out.  Combine them and get a great monitor for peanuts.  Of course, if you are just doing non-production level stuff at home, there are a bunch of good 24″ models these days and prices have plummeted.  SAMSUNG, ASUS and BENQ put out a couple of good ones.  ACER seems to be a bit lower quality to my eye.

Tablet

In the words of They Might Be Giants, S-E-X-X-Y

It might be hard to believe, because I am so awesome, but for some bizarre reason I used a mouse with Shake for the first year of production.  Why?  Buggered if I know.  I tried using a tablet a couple of times but I found it quite unwieldy.  When I changed studios and was essentially forced to use one, it took me about 2 solid weeks for it to feel totally natural.  Remember that I had been using a mouse for maybe 18-19 years, so cut me some slack!  I have since started using the tablet for my 3D work and again, while unwieldy at first, you soon get the hang of it.

Check out the new Wcom Intuos 4 for some freaking sexxalicious tablet goodness.  Do you need the latest thing?  Not really.  Keep an eye out for run out stock of the excellent Intuous 3’s.  At this juncture I would only really recommend Wacom.  I know some people, especially students, are tempted by cheaper products, such as Genius, but really, you get what you pay for and you can claim it on tax.  Tablets and monitors are like shoes . . . you use them everyday and they are critical, so don’t sell yourself short but buying cheap gear.

Video Card

Any decent gaming card.  It has been well established that Quadro’s offer negligible performance benefits for the average user.  Get your studio to buy them if you desparately want one, and even then I think they would baulk at shelling out the kind of cash nVidia ask for those things.  Some people may swear by ATI, but nVidia just seem to be more stable across all your needs.

Chair

My bottom wants to meet this chair

Chairs?  What the heck are you talking about Matt?  Who gives a sod about chairs?  I admit that this is a luxury, but only to a certain extent.  Like  a monitor, a chair is something you will be using pretty much every minute of your working day.  You are sitting on your arse all day, so why by uncomfortable?  The Herman Miller Aeron is the King of Chairs for the arduous bum-sitting marathons that are found in CG.  Expensive as all get out, but your cheeks deserve to be coddled.

And now for the pure insanity of Stefan Didak’s setup.  ”Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Stefan Didak presents "Gentlemen Start Your Monitors"

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I am not sure about you guys, but just like the Russians I have a Five Year Plan.  As it happens, much like the Russkies, my Five Year Plan is going a bit pear shaped but that is because of capitalism, not the unattainable utopia of pure communism.  Don’t worry, this does actually relate to computer graphics and compositing.

We Will Turn the Five Year Plan into a Four Year One

At the moment there is not much work around.  Anywhere.  There is not that much work on in Hollywood, there doesn’t seem to be too much work in London and there is certainly not much work in Australia, which is a much smaller industry.  When I say there isn’t much work, I mean for people like you and me, not senior artists with 5+ years of experience in film or TV.  The Global Economic Crisis is biting hard and the industry is still stumbling to get things moving after the disastrous writer’s strike last year. Couple that with the possibility of an actor’s strike and I will be honest when I say I am not feeling too confident.

So what about this Five Year Plan?

Well, given that at time I went back to study I was a bit older than the average computer graphics student (I was around 30) and was leaving a very stable and reasonably paid government job, I gave myself 5 years to prove myself.  For me a prime measure of having achieved some kind of success in the industry was to be earning at least as much as I did in the government.  The way I see it (and you may not agree),  I have to really question doing visual effects if I can’t make money.  I would like to say that I would do it for the love of it, and I would in some form, but at age 34 I have bills to pay, I need savings and I need to think about my future.  Depending on how old you are as you read this, these may not be the same issues you have, but you will have them at some point in your career.

Another issue has reared it’s head though.  Actually it reared itself (oooeerr vicar!) after my very first gig.  This industry is almost predominantly contract based.  You have to assume that you will not be working for 3mths of the year and base your rates and spending/saving on that basis.  Maybe you work for 12mths, maybe you work for 6mths, but on average you can assume that you won’t be working for 1/4 of the year.  If you don’t see any issues with that, let’s look at a couple of things:

1.  For the most part you won’t know when the next job is coming up, where it is and how much it will pay.  Maybe you do if you have 10 years experience.  With 3 years experience I don’t have that luxury.

2.  Given that you often don’t know where your next income stream is coming from, you have to keep a reasonably large amount of cash on hand to be fluid (ie pay bills/rent/food etc) and saving is difficult.

3.  Thinking about getting a loan?  Think again without a steady income from an employer.

So all this is weighing on my mind at the moment.  I am in year 4 of the Five Year Plan.  So far I think it has been going pretty well.  I got offered a job before I finished my course and over the last 3 years I have been doing progressively more advanced work on higher profile projects.  However, I don’t think too many people predicted the Global Economic Crisis.  This level of economic depression really is a once in a lifetime (hopefully!) event and it has happened right in the middle of my bloody plan!

As such, I am considering not even including this year in the Five Year Plan.  At the moment I looking at going back to government work to pay the bills for the next 6mths as I am currently sitting on 3mths without a paying job and there is only so long that you can listen to various HR people tell you that there is “work coming up”.

Thinking about the situation positively, I can see this year as time to increase various skills.  As I have mentioned, I started off in 3D but drifted into compositing.  I am hitting Maya hard and getting back into 3D as a believe that will make me a more flexible person to have on the team.  I am focusing on learning lighting in Maya and match-moving with PFTrack.  I am also working on this blog and volunteering on a Star Wars fanfilm to keep up my compositing skills.

Soooooo, even though there is a crisis, there are always opportunities to expand your skill base and knowledge.

National Public Radio: Planet Money – Excellent jargon free podcast explaining the economics of the Global Economic Crisis

The Soviet Union and Five Year Plans - How to make a plan and not stick to it

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Here is a cool tip that was passed on to me by one of our supervisors on Australia.  The idea is to use a colour lookup curve to shape how the edges of your matte are blurred, pushing the white pixels out to the edge or pulling them back into the core of your matte.

As always, if you have any questions or tips post them here. I would be especially happy if you have your own blog and can show how to replicate these techniques in other software. I just don’t have enough time or knowledge to do the tutorials in each application.

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A short post this Sunday with some thoughts about “The Spirit”.  I realise that The Spirit has been out for a while in the USA but it is a relative new release in Australia (yay for delayed release schedules).

Credit: Lions Gate LLC. Image The Orphanage.

There are two reasons I went to see The Spirit.  Firstly, it obviously shares a lot in common with Sin City and frankly, Sin City kicks so many types of buttocks that there may actually be a law about it.  The second reason is that a couple of mates worked on the film with Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) in Adelaide and I am happy to pay bucks for films that mates work on.

I will also say that I knew before going on that this wasn’t a serious movie and I fully prepared by having a nice big Coke and some cheesy snacks at the ready.

Lights down, movie starts . . . ooookay.  Maybe it gets better.  Maybe I am missing something.  Give it time.  Why are there only 8 people in the cinema?  I know it has been getting bad reviews, but let’s all give it a go, eh?  Oh dear.  Oh dear, oh dear.  Just what the hell is going in?  Who is he?  Why are they fighting?  That bit isn’t funny.  Who is she?  Do I care?  Why is she dressed like a Japanese Maiko?  Why are they dressed like Nazi’s.  Why is that hot latino chick acting so badly?  Surely it has been 2 hours?  It’s over, thank God.  What?  Only 90 minutes . . . you have to be kidding me.

I will go on record as saying that I liked the film visually.  Not quite as unique and intense as Sin City, but definitely it’s own style.  No, it was just a bad movie.  How do I define bad?  Well, when I think 90 minutes is over 2hrs and I am waiting for the movie to finish, it’s bad.  When I literally don’t care about any of the characters, it’s a bad movie.  When I don’t know who is doing what or why they are doing it, it’s a bad movie.

Well, I am sure you have your own opinions, but for me The Spirit was almost the definition of style over substance.  It looked amazing but had nothing to say, and that’s a shame . . .

Okay, okay.  You may have strong feelings about fan films.  Me?  I am kind of up in the air as I have seen some shockers and I have seen some amazing work.  Either way though they always involve people who are doing it for the sheer love of making something that they believe in and are willing to get off their bums and give it a shot, and I always give that two thumbs up.

Check out the recent Half Life 2 fanfilm “Escape From City 17 – Part One” which has been doing the rounds recently.  Short, sweet, focused and with very passable VFX all made for $500.  As far as I know most of the hero 3D models are meshes straight from the game.  The match-moving is top notch which opens up a lot of possibilities for set-extensions.  If you have solid tracking, suddenly you aren’t limited by what you see.  Having said that, the locations were well chosen and more importantly, the whole thing captures the atmosphere of Half Life 2.  I will go on record as saying that Half Life 2 has been the most immersive game experience I have yet had.  So much care was taken with everything, from the look to the models, to the texturing and, possibly the most overlooked factor, the sound.

So, given that fanfilms can be great, why not volunteer?  As an aspiring compositor I would urge us all to consider helping out, as fanfilms can provide the most important thing . . . footage.  Chances are you don’t have the ability to set up a greenscreen shoot for your own stuff, rustle up costumes and actors and make all the 3D props.  By being involved in a team, suddenly you have access to ready made elements and you can concentrate on your compositing.  Another thing is that unless you are really lucky and working with something like DigiBeta or Red camera, you will be working on crummy DV footage.  Most likely crummy DV footage with badly lit greenscreen with the default sharpening filter on the camera left on.  Think of this as a test though . . . if you can develop the chops to get decent keys from this footage, when you graduate to film you will be laughing!

The downside is that you have to spend a bit of time weeding out the crummy projects.  If they don’t have strong leadership and focus, keeping everyone on the same page, they can become a dismal timesuck with nothing to show at the end of it.  I am not against cutting your losses if things go downhill, but do your homework first so you are not leaving people in the lurch if you decide to leave.

Sooooo, having said all that I just signed up for a fanfilm named Star Wars: The Forgotten.  I found out about it on a thread talking about online collaborations and the problems facing people and I contacted the director, Douglas, wishing him good luck.  We exchanged a few emails but at the time I was working on ‘Australia’ as well as teaching at Uni, so I had literally no spare time.

Come February and work is thin on the ground everywhere in Australia, so along with upping my Maya skills I thought I might check in and see how it is going.  Seems that it is full steam ahead and Douglas even has an old VFX maestro on board: George Muhs who worked on VFX for such films as “The Hunt for Red October”, “Robocop”, “Ghostbusters 2″, “Scrooged” and  ”Earth Girls Are Easy”.  Not a bad pedigree!

I had my first online meeting on Monday after downloading my footage and checking all the design docs and I have to say I was impressed with the organisation.  I feel confident that the people running the project have it sorted and that is a big thing when it comes to fan films.  I have checked my shots and done a few quick tests in Shake and while the footage is certainly not perfect, I reckon we can get something decent out of it.

Maybe the film will be great, maybe it won’t.  I don’t know at this stage, but I can tell you that I am busy honing my compositing skills and I have already met some interesting new people who I might get to work with again in the future, so it is all good!

Check out:

RvD2: Ryan vs. Dorkman 2 – a very impressive lightsaber battle with FX contirbutions by our own Daniel Broadway

http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/

http://www.fanfilms.net/

>> UPDATE <<

Whoah!  I just recalled that one of my first exercises in compositing was a Star Wars Lightsaber duel (surely most nerds would say the same thing) in Combustion.  I ordered the DV Garage Composite Toolkit and the Composite Toolkit Companion and followed their excellent tutorials to produce this wonder.  Unfortunately the tutorial was for After Effects, so I had to convert almost every step to make it work in Combustion, but I sure learned a lot!  To be honest, it still doesn’t look too bloody bad for someone’s first go at real compositing

Of course, at the time, I had no real idea what I was doing.  Now it all seems so straightforward and obvious, but back then it was some kind of arcane magic that you could make cool stuff happen!

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